Englishman in Bandung

Brit in Indonesia

WOW! Great response to the lizard yesterday. So many great comments, even made spotlight. Well this early start has put me way ahead of schedule so today's is cupping the lizards reign short by a few hours. Thank you everyone.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I spotted this little darling at 06:30 this morning, flying the flag on the other side of the planet. My first though was a moth straying into the daylight, but the antennae indicate a butterfly, so some research required for this interesting subject.

I hit the plantation at 06:00am just to have a look if anything was going on, seeing as the 07:00 sessions seemed quite fruitful. There was enough action to keep me busy as I collected images of eleven subjects: wasp moth, a 3 spot, 6 spot, two different 7 spots and an 11 spot brown butterfly, a female pansy butterfly, bugs and a dragon, plus a shot of a new St Andrews cross spider.

So much material went straight in the bin, as once again I had a really bad focusing day. After yesterdays bad focus day I was really careful and pedantic about the focusing and my shutter release technique. There was a slight breeze and so I expected to lose a few shots, but this was ridiculous. This has to be a hardware problem. Enough material was left to give me a choice and I went with the union Jack for it's unique value, but you can see that the best of twenty shots was not nailed.

The green dragonfly (Sabina Sabina) was interesting, I only got one mediocre shot of it resting on a blade of grass, but every few seconds it would take off and bite at several grass seed heads, the type with fluffy seeds. I tried shooting this action but was not surprised to end up with a blurry mess. I did examine the seed heads and found no insects or moisture, so this strange action left me a tad confused.

I spotted the green striped lizard that I blipped yesterday, in a different location, but it vanished before I could get anywhere near any camera action. The spider was a juvenile St Andrews, I took a couple of shots, but it seemed pointless as it was never going to make blip.

Towards the end of the session I started seeing a lot of red dragons, so I chased them around the park for a while, but they were not allowing me to get anywhere near. No big deal, too soon for another red anyway, maybe next month.

It was a busy session but it didn't leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling. Ah well, better luck tomorrow. Maybe break out the screw drivers and socket set and open up the camera.